Want to enjoy, hate, love and rage at a game in the space of one hour? Trials HD is here to help you.
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This summer season of XBLA games has been very impressive, with the likes of old-school Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and Marvel vs Capcom renditions making their way onto the marketplace service and the excitable ‘Splosion Man sploding all over the show. Trials HD is the penultimate title this summer and RedLynx’s physic-dominated game is the perfect way to spend a bunch of your free time. Infact, due to the way the game plays, you may have to make time for it.
WHAT YOU’LL LIKE:
Lots of stuff to do
Trials HD ships with over 50 tracks spread over five difficulty settings. Starting from beginner, tracks get progressively harder through each category until you move on to the next, with easy, medium, hard and extreme all awaiting your cycle. Completing a level gives you a bronze medal, which then open up the requirements for the silver and gold medals. Simply completing a track with a bronze medal rewards you with a small percentage on completion, whereas a gold medal gives you full credit. Each successive medal has you finishing a track in a set time with a limited amount of faults, and with gold medals come unlockable items such as mini-games (named skill games) and newer bikes.
Skill games are great if you want to sit back and compete with your friends via online leaderboards. There are 12 modes including a ski jump, hill climb, a super challenging balance-on-a-ball and other games which demand epic amounts of time and patience. Not all are available from the start, honing your skills in the single player not only pays off for the modes themselves, but also to climb your way up the leaderboards.
This happens quite a lot, but you'll still play on
There are a number of tournaments too, where you must complete a series of races under a certain time. The times are tallied up over all the courses and thrown onto leaderboards so you can compare with the world.
Awesome track editor
A robust track editor features in Trials HD, and everything is available at the user’s disposal to create tracks as seen in the single player. You can make tracks as exciting or as impossible as you feel and share them with your friends. I created a particularly interesting monstrosity where I have called upon gravity to vanish entirely, and make the player travel straight up a vertical wall, with a pile of bombs waiting on the other side if they make it over. Designing an intricate level with varying tasks isn’t difficult, and some of the gems I’ve found online are only the beginning of what will come.
Hard in a good way
Sure, Trials HD easies you in with its multitude of tracks but the difficulty level jacks up very quickly. Simply attacking each jump at high speed may result in you soaring across the map, but the landing will slow your bike down and drop a chunk of time on you. Feathering the throttle is as big a part as shifting your rider’s weight correctly, and the little dial in the top left of the screen counting your faults will regularly clock over 50. The checkpoint system is friendly however, with a restart point after every tough obstacle.
I think this is the wrong approach...
The relentless difficulty of the latter levels will eventually become frustrating, but the medal system in Trials HD will always keep you muttering ‘one more go’. In order to help players when they are stuck, a replay system gives access to the runs of the top dogs on the leaderboards, with a Gran Turismo style display showing how they move the stick and use the accelerator.
WHAT YOU WON’T LIKE:
No direct multiplayer
I would’ve liked to have seen something like you used to see in old rally stages, where two cars are parked next to each other and then race around a track with only a barrier separating them. While the leaderboards provide great competition, watching yourself race against someone is far more enjoyable.
RECOMMENDATION:
Trials HD is a fantastic game, easily one of the best XBLA releases of the year so far. The simplicity of the controls with the complexity of the maps make for such a challenging and exciting experience that even if you clock up over 100 faults, you want to make it to the end of the level. Although in the closing couple of tracks the difficulty becomes almost unfathomable, checking out the replays to see where you went wrong urges you on to not only complete it, but also demolish the time of the replay you watched. The single player will take between 4-6 hours to complete and the level editor and skill games add a huge amount of play time on top of that. Lacking a direct multiplayer mode is slightly disappointing, but with the Xbox Live party chat system, something similar can easily be mocked up.
Trials HD
Systems: Xbox Live Arcade
Developer: RedLynx LTD
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Find: Amazon - Goozex - Xbox Live Marketplace
All reviews are based on final retail code unless otherwise noted.
Want to know more about the game? Just ask! We love to hear ourselves type, and might even say something vaguely resembling an answer to your question(s)…
August 17th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
I whole-heartedly agree. Even after I’ve messed up a 100 times I instantly restart and try again. GREAT game!
August 17th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I have discovered a new problem with this game: When going for completion on the super hard levels, I constantly hit the back button instead of B thinking I was on a speed run. That’s my muscle memory defeating my actual needs, showing how addictive this game is.
August 24th, 2009 at 8:38 am
Hi girls.
If you like this, and more importantly like RETRO gaming - look at it’s obvious forefather: Kickstart 1 and 2 on the Commodore 64 and Amiga.
Days and days I spent playing those games, and here I am 15 years later doing the same thing with Trials! Great fun!